Winter Final

After our final review, I realized that my presentation board wasn’t expressive enough of the ideas I have to overtake this site with food, agriculture, and green spaces. They wanted to see more, which makes me grateful to have another term to explore and push this project to the next level.

In terms of the natural resources on the site, I see next term as a chance to look at sunlight and it’s effect on where garden and agricultural space should be intended. I plan to draw out a few shading studies of where shadows hit on the site to exclude those zones as primary growing space. Sunlight is essential to our lives as well as natural organisms, so I would like to ensure that every plant and user on the site has access to natural daylight and fresh air, also pushing the shading screens to be more integrative. Another resource here, related to growing food, is waste and how we can move cycles through the site to reuse compost to heat the building or to fertilize the plants.

The spacial organization on the site is working well, but the shaded outdoor spaces need to be developed and the massing could be more connected. I may push pieces of the central “gem” to extend throughout the district and make the massing more expressive of this pushing and pulling strategy to show the interlock of building structures.

Experiencing the space through different textures, light quality through perforated screens, elevated terraces, and connections to gardens is the goal that I had in creating the photo collage perspectives. I think it gives an exciting look at how lively the site could be, but it could show more of what happens at different times of the day or seasons of the year.

The facade is not pushing the interlocking idea as well and needs more opaque systems versus solely glass. The ground floor could show more through perspectives of how an arcade of overhead trellises can create shelter for pedestrians and how this extends throughout.

Related the that, the building tectonics need to be further described in my perspectives. I will be working next term to push these interlocking L shapes and overlapping of materials to show the layering of different processes. The first layer is people, the second layer is site and nature, the third is food and tangible products that create waste, and last is sunlight. How the structure works as a system will be defined through cantilevered concrete slabs with structural steel columns, curtain walls, and a wood composite paneling to wrap the exterior.

I was playing around in SketchUp before the final and wish I had shown my ideas more through graphics that I do want the site to be integrative of community gardens and urban agriculture. Here’s a snapshot of that concept I’m playing with.